10 Books About Women Colliding with Wild Creatures

Illustration by Walter Crane from Beauty and The Beast, public domain via Wikimedia Commons Long before the question of “man versus bear” began to tear up TikTok, people have contemplated what it’s like to be with a beast. The earliest art we know of, cave paintings and rock carvings, shows humans interacting with wild animals. Over the tens of thousands of years since making those early marks, people have domesticated wolves, learned how to keep livestock, and forged bonds with countless beings furred, feathered, and scaled. Oh, yeah, and started asking the tough questions on TikTok, too. It’s been a great run. Considering this long legacy, it comes as no surprise that some of our most exciting, absorbing, and resonant stories are about the human-creature relationship. Through stories, we both tell each other what’s real and imagine what might be possible. And when we put a woman at our story’s center—as is the case in my new novel, Bear —we can explore a particularly compelling point of view on each. In the books below, the women who meet wild creatures, both animal and mythical, are often trapped in their own lives. Domestic drudgery rules. They’re homemakers, caretakers, wives and mothers and daughters and sisters who are struggling against the limitations imposed on them. When they meet a beast, though, they are able to get to a previously inaccessible wildness. They break away from human rules, a strictly human world, and into something other—something extraordinary, something free. The beast outside provokes the transformation within. This is a reading list made to communicate how we might experience the same ourselves. Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms From Around the World edited by Maria Tatar If you’ve only seen the Disney movie, you haven’t yet heard the whole of Beauty and the Beast. In this collection, fairy-tale scholar Maria Tatar gathers humanity’s many stories about those who wed animals. She writes of those animal spouses: “They stand in for everything we disavow in ourselves—ferocity, bestiality, and untamed urges. Because our relationship to them is saturated with mysterious […]

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